date:20090202

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz 
bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Morgan Collett wrote:
  Also don't blame avahi for the fact that we send out updates every
  time you alt-tab between shared activities, so that your icon can jump
  to the appropriate snowflake on everyone else's Neighborhood Views...

 I _strongly_ object to this behavior.  Not only is this flooding the mesh
 with useless broadcasts, but it provides exactly the _wrong_ result in the
 UI.  When I look at the Neighborhood view, I want to see who is
 participating in each shared instance.  Instead,  the view shows me who is
 in that particular window at this time.  It's as if IRC clients only
 showed you as present in the room that is currently visible on your screen.


+1

-Wade
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Re: Touchpad problem

Tks all, I will try the four finger salute!

I might try 8.2.1, but I don't really have time for now, maybe soon.

Either way, the real problem hasn't been identified, is that right? Since
the solution seems to be running some kind of script, either forced or
automatically.

Best regards,

   Tiago Marques


On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 6:00 PM, p...@laptop.org wrote:

 daniel wrote:
   2009/2/1  p...@laptop.org:
i asked dan the same thing.  the only true fix i know of in 8.2.1
keeps the touchpad from locking up entirely on occasion.  this
happens only rarely in earlier releases (and can be corrected by
suspending/resuming the laptop).
  
   That's what I'm referring to. Details are a little unclear but I think
   that Tiago is describing the exact problem that you fixed where
   recalibration fails and the mouse stops. I think this is a fair
   assumption given how often this seems to happen...

 ah -- sorry.  i misread his symptoms.

 paul
 =-
  paul fox, p...@laptop.org
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Re: Touchpad problem

2009-02-02 Thread Daniel Drake

2009/2/2 Tiago Marques tiago...@gmail.com:
 Tks all, I will try the four finger salute!

 I might try 8.2.1, but I don't really have time for now, maybe soon.

 Either way, the real problem hasn't been identified, is that right? Since
 the solution seems to be running some kind of script, either forced or
 automatically.

The real problem is (apparently) in hardware.

Daniel
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Aside: Neighborhood participants

2009-02-02 Thread Gary C Martin

On 2 Feb 2009, at 16:43, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Morgan Collett wrote:
 Also don't blame avahi for the fact that we send out updates every
 time you alt-tab between shared activities, so that your icon can  
 jump
 to the appropriate snowflake on everyone else's Neighborhood Views...

 I _strongly_ object to this behavior.  Not only is this flooding the  
 mesh
 with useless broadcasts, but it provides exactly the _wrong_ result  
 in the
 UI.  When I look at the Neighborhood view, I want to see who is
 participating in each shared instance.  Instead,  the view shows me  
 who is
 in that particular window at this time.  It's as if IRC clients only
 showed you as present in the room that is currently visible on your  
 screen.

+1

 We should remove this feature and instead show each person in the  
 ring
 around each activity they have joined.

However there are some interesting UI design issues (). XO buddy icons  
are currently unique identities, this will lead to your icons being in  
multiple places in the neighbourhood (and group) view (on each shared  
activity). More icons mean less space... Have you seen ~30-40 buddies  
on a jabber server? Wow it's crowded as is, let's hope gadget and  
smart filters work well. i.e see who you want by default and be able  
to easily find those gadget decides to hide from you... Actually I can  
almost see this being a case for replacing the neighbourhood with just  
custom smart groups UI; you start with some reasonable default gadget  
filter; then create new groups for your different needs (perhaps a  
maths class group, a friends group, a pen-pals group, an artists group  
etc). Maybe the neighbourhood view ends up pretty much just showing  
icons for subgroups.

An interesting design challenge, especially trying to keep the zoom  
metaphor consistant...

--Gary

 - --Ben
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 ldUAoJ+q09kT87G/PzJDdT2ND3HzE0Fl
 =yxQR
 -END PGP SIGNATURE-
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:10 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@laptop.org wrote:
 IEEE chose to make wi-fi networks look like 802.11 LANs, similar to
 ethernet.  It might have been a bad idea in retrospect, but now we
 have to live with it.

 AFAIK, the bulk of the problem with multicasts over 802.11s (and not
 all wi-fi networks) is that those must be propagated at the slowest
 possible link speed in order to reach all nodes.

This is irrelevant, really.  Protocols are designed with certain
assumptions.  Those assumptions (mostly having to do with the behavior
and cost of broadcasts) were true when the protocols were designed,
and are no longer true today.  This is the way of all software, it's
not unique to 802.11s in some way.

 Like Martin, you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.

 Ok, but how would the laptops advertise their SRV records without
 multicast DNS?

 Wait, are you perhaps suggesting to use DDNS to publish those services
 on a nameserver running on the XS?

That is how DNS-SD works, yes.
 --scott

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@laptop.org wrote:
 Morgan Collett wrote:
 Also don't blame avahi for the fact that we send out updates every
 time you alt-tab between shared activities, so that your icon can jump
 to the appropriate snowflake on everyone else's Neighborhood Views...
 as well as sending who joined and left...

 Mature GUIs have a common pattern to avoid too much graphical
 flickering on possibly rapid state transitions, such as setting a busy
 pointer or disabling buttons while some operation is in progress.

 I don't know if it has a name, but the algorithm is exactly the same
 for de-bouncing mechanical keys: you propagate the event only after
 the state has settled for a certain amount of time.

 This would take away a certain percentage of spurious updates, but the
 number basically remains proportional to the number of users so it
 doesn't scale much better.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_architecture#Direct_presence_interrogation
describes an algorithm to ensure that the amount of traffic in the net
is kept proportional to the number of users.  (The algorithm you
describe is actually proportional to the number of users squared or
cubed, because the size of the messages as well as the number of such
messages increases with the # of users.  If a mesh network is
involved, the number of rebroadcasts necessary is another factor
roughly proportional to the size of the network.)
 --scott

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
 This is irrelevant, really.  Protocols are designed with certain
 assumptions.  Those assumptions (mostly having to do with the behavior
 and cost of broadcasts) were true when the protocols were designed,
 and are no longer true today.  This is the way of all software, it's
 not unique to 802.11s in some way.

You make it look like there was an alternative to broadcasts in a peer
to peer network, but I don't see any way out unless you want to have
master browsers with elections in the best Windows workgroup tradition.

Anyway, stuff that doesn't exist yet.


 Wait, are you perhaps suggesting to use DDNS to publish those services
 on a nameserver running on the XS?
 
 That is how DNS-SD works, yes.

I do not understand the security side of it, and how old records get
garbage collected unless you do a periodic refresh.

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@laptop.org wrote:
 C. Scott Ananian wrote:
 This is irrelevant, really.  Protocols are designed with certain
 assumptions.  Those assumptions (mostly having to do with the behavior
 and cost of broadcasts) were true when the protocols were designed,
 and are no longer true today.  This is the way of all software, it's
 not unique to 802.11s in some way.

 You make it look like there was an alternative to broadcasts in a peer
 to peer network, but I don't see any way out unless you want to have
 master browsers with elections in the best Windows workgroup tradition.

I think you've left the topic.  You also seem to be trying to solve
five different problems at once, without acknowledging that the
solutions might be different (even if the abstraction is the same).

 Anyway, stuff that doesn't exist yet.

What? WfW was just a nightmare?  Whew.

 Wait, are you perhaps suggesting to use DDNS to publish those services
 on a nameserver running on the XS?

 That is how DNS-SD works, yes.

 I do not understand the security side of it, and how old records get
 garbage collected unless you do a periodic refresh.

Research, young butterfly.  I'm not finding this thread very useful, sorry.
 --scott

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Re: AMD to stop working on Geodes (Carlos Nazareno)

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 4:39 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote:

 On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 5:14 PM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote:
  On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Carlos Nazareno object...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
   AMD sees no Geode chip replacement in sight
   AMD on Monday said it has no replacement for the aging Geode low-power
   chips that are used in netbooks and set-top boxes.
  
 http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/274414/amd_sees_no_geode_chip_replacement_sight
 
 
  The cost of developing and supporting a processor family is staggering.
 
  AMD bought the Geode business from another company.  Often, when a
 company buys a business unit, that unit withers on the vine.  The new kids
 on the block have a difficult time establishing a strong place within the
 established pecking order, so in the competition for resources, the new
 group often comes up short.  When there is an economic downturn, the new
 group is often the first to go.
 
  AMD barely has the resources to maintain a competitive stance in the part
 of the market that has traditionally been their core, especially now that
 the economy is bad.
 
  I'm sure that AMD would be very happy if they had enough money to go
 after the low power market, but they just don't.
 
 
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 Somebody on Slashdot (yeah!) has a good write-up pointing to the fact
 that AMD isn't halting production. Its just not going to develop Geode
 further. http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1105799cid=26623857

 From the comment:


 begin quote

 AMD is NOT halting production of the Geode. They are not leaving the
 market (RTFM!). They have decided that it serves it's niche AS IS and
 will be kept AS IS. That's a very different statement. They're saying
 that it is a mature product (a rare thing in IT).

 Currently, the Geode is good enough for many applications and would be
 a step up for others. The embedded world tends away from the shiny
 object model of upgrades. If it worked last year, it works this year,
 and it'll work next year. Changes in the product are considered
 undesirable.

 AMD's statement doesn't even mean there won't be a die shrink or even
 a faster Geode in the future, just that they won't be updating it's
 architecture.

 It's not a bad decision either. There is a significant niche for the
 Geode between the Atom (too hot, too power hungry) and things like the
 Dragon Ball and mips (not enough power).

 Geode isn't in trouble until Intel comes out with an x86 that doesn't
 need a heatsink (or at least doesn't need a fan).

This is also referred to, in another thread, but the Atom draws very little
power. I already referred that you can get an Atom that has a 0.65W TDP, not
3.whatever like in the Geode LX. These are the Z series and they draw very
little power, top of 2.4W for the 1866MHz model. The other low-end chip(also
$20), the Z510, has a TDP of 2W - any one of these can run without an
heatsink, mostly a small metal plate that allows the silicon core to
dissipate heat, since it's a fliped-chip design. The Z500 is obviously very
very good for embedded applications.
The Z series use a lower power CMOS bus, instead of the power hungry GTL+,
which when paired with Poulsbo it should make for a remarkable package. The
next iteration will also have the graphics core and some other stuff
embedded, for further savings.
Best regards,
  Tiago Marques
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Re: OLPC upgrades

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Frank Ch. Eigler f...@redhat.com wrote:

 Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org writes:

  [...]  It's also worth pointing out that the new low-power x86
  processors, Atom being the poster child, are still stuck with
  power-hungry support chips - memory and display controllers.  That
  might change soon, but for now it's still the case.  [...]

 According to the ACPI battery gauges under Fedora 10, my Fujitsu U820
 UMPC (Atom Z530, Poulsbo GMA500 MCH/graphics) takes around 6W *total*

 during light webby operations.

 This is probably correct:

(copy paste from other thread)The Atom draws very little power. I already
referred that there is an Atom that has a 0.65W TDP, not 3.whatever like in
the Geode LX. These are the Z series and they draw very little power, top of
2.4W for the 1866MHz model. The other low-end chip(also $20), the Z510, has
a TDP of 2W - any one of these can run without an heatsink, mostly a small
metal plate that allows the silicon core to dissipate heat, since it's a
fliped-chip design. The Z500 is obviously very very good for embedded
applications.
The Z series use a lower power CMOS bus, instead of the power hungry GTL+,
which when paired with Poulsbo it should make for a remarkable package. The
next iteration will also have the graphics core and some other stuff
embedded, for further savings.



 - FChE
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

2009-02-02 Thread Morgan Collett

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 14:18, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 5:13 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@laptop.org wrote:
 Martin Langhoff wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:39 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 My suggestions:  DNS-SD and libepc (http://live.gnome.org/libepc/).
 There's no need for Sugar-specific solutions here; we just need to use
 existing standard solutions.

 Yep - I want existing standard stuff, but the devil we know seems to
 swamp the spectrum with 802.11s.

 When I read the Zeroconf book, I got the impression that the
 _standard_ was carefully designed to minimize needless broadcasts and
 scale well in real scenarios.  I can't comment on the current Avahi
 _implementation_ though.

 This is true for wired networks; not necessarily true for mobile
 and/or wireless networks.

 Like Martin, you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.
  --scott

Also don't blame avahi for the fact that we send out updates every
time you alt-tab between shared activities, so that your icon can jump
to the appropriate snowflake on everyone else's Neighborhood Views...
as well as sending who joined and left...

Regards
Morgan
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Re: Service announcement scheme - (Re: [Sugar-devel] A small request.)

2009-02-02 Thread Martin Langhoff

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:17 AM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/4489030/4489031/04489571.pdf?temp=x

 I don't want adventure. I want something old and safe ;-)

 Maybe we can fake this with good old DNS lookups - but those will fail
 if the DNS server has a wildcard (like commercial hotspots do).

 I think you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.

Perhaps. The paper abstract mentions both, and seems to say that the
solution is with DNS-SD+new software. There's another paper from the
same authors that talks about saturation in mesh networks.

I'd like to read that paper (anyone got access to IEEE pubs?) . In
fact, I'd like to find that someone has implemented DNS-SD on 802.11s
networks and had a raging success. I want it simple and safe :-)

cheers,


m
-- 
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 mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

Martin Langhoff wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:39 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 My suggestions:  DNS-SD and libepc (http://live.gnome.org/libepc/).
 There's no need for Sugar-specific solutions here; we just need to use
 existing standard solutions.
 
 Yep - I want existing standard stuff, but the devil we know seems to
 swamp the spectrum with 802.11s.

When I read the Zeroconf book, I got the impression that the
_standard_ was carefully designed to minimize needless broadcasts and
scale well in real scenarios.  I can't comment on the current Avahi
_implementation_ though.

Even if the standard itself is flawed, designing a custom protocol to
do the same thing is going to be a lot of work and probably end up
facing the very same design issues that made the IEFT's standard
inadequate for us in the first place.

When it comes to non-trivial networking protocols, I don't trust any
given individual to be able to do a good job without going through an
*extensive* iterative design process with public reviews of interim
drafts.

What's hardest about networking is that it looks deceptively easy at
first :-)

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Re: Service announcement scheme - (Re: [Sugar-devel] A small request.)

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Martin Langhoff
martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:17 AM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/4489030/4489031/04489571.pdf?temp=x

 I don't want adventure. I want something old and safe ;-)

 Maybe we can fake this with good old DNS lookups - but those will fail
 if the DNS server has a wildcard (like commercial hotspots do).

 I think you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.

 Perhaps. The paper abstract mentions both, and seems to say that the
 solution is with DNS-SD+new software. There's another paper from the
 same authors that talks about saturation in mesh networks.

 I'd like to read that paper (anyone got access to IEEE pubs?) . In
 fact, I'd like to find that someone has implemented DNS-SD on 802.11s
 networks and had a raging success. I want it simple and safe :-)

802.11s is not simple, nor safe.

Please concentrate on plain 802.11 networks for now.
 --scott

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Re: Service announcement scheme - (Re: [Sugar-devel] A small request.)

2009-02-02 Thread david

 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Martin Langhoff
 martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:17 AM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/4489030/4489031/04489571.pdf?temp=x

 I don't want adventure. I want something old and safe ;-)

 Maybe we can fake this with good old DNS lookups - but those will fail
 if the DNS server has a wildcard (like commercial hotspots do).

 I think you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.

 Perhaps. The paper abstract mentions both, and seems to say that the
 solution is with DNS-SD+new software. There's another paper from the
 same authors that talks about saturation in mesh networks.

 I'd like to read that paper (anyone got access to IEEE pubs?) . In
 fact, I'd like to find that someone has implemented DNS-SD on 802.11s
 networks and had a raging success. I want it simple and safe :-)

nobody else is running 802.11s yet, so you aren't going to find reports of 
people using _anything_ with a raging success on 802.11s

David Lang
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Re: OLPC upgrades

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote:

 Guess what? The people at OLPC, who aren't stupid, already considered
 every point in the message cited below, a long time ago. So why aren't
 we doing them? ...* *On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Carlos Nazareno
 object...@gmail.comwrote:

Nobody's saying anyone is stupid. It is perfectly natural for people to
complain about things they don't understand. I also wish I could, from time
to time, to ask this or that, to understand many things I don't comprehend,
to know what I can do to help. This without getting into any kind of fight
with the people involved with the project, who are the only ones who can
answer those questions.
As with any critical comment I may issue in this mailing list,* please take
it as something constructive*, to help (if it does, in any way) and not to
criticize the people who are hard at work. That, I think, is what Carlos was
trying to do.
I got my XO three weeks ago and there's a lot I was surprised to learn that
some of the more important features are WIP or simply don't work, especially
given the news that I've read, already detailing prototypes of a second
version, when there's still a lot to do with the first one.
Sugar is a fantastic window manager/desktop/user interface/learning
tool/whatever. I don't understand how can *any* government give 6 year olds
anything that's not Sugar - it is wonderful, it integrates very well with
the XO and I would like to be able to use it more but it doesn't really
blend well with the rest of the Linux software ecosystem.
This, among other things, may be the cause that the G1G1 program wasn't
successful this year. There are too many better options, for a regular user,
currently available, and cheaper. Most people don't care for a reflective
screen if they can't have Youtube. They already can have 5 hours of battery
life(or more) in some netbooks, a lot more flash memory/HDD, better *color*
screen. Even then some people claim the performance of netbooks isn't good
enough - imagine what they would say about an XO.
I'm surprised how much stuff still doesn't work in the XO. I can't, for as
much as I think about it, how can you be shipping these things without space
for swap memory. I can open a PDF and a browser without the XO being
apparently crashed and this is the most basic stuff. I know why the system
crashes but you can't expect a politician to understand why Intel's
offering doesn't crash and yours does all the time, *it just makes it look
like crap*, which it certainly isn't. Doing SWAP in the embedded flash is a
bad ideia but there's an SD card slot and having the XO crashing all the
time is a worst case scenario - it may be a compromise in Africa but not in
the least developed country.
There's no stylus support yet, there's no view source working(AFAIK) and the
wireless range isn't as awsome as announced. My mother has an Acer One
which, apparently, has a significantly better wireless signal, at least from
small experiences, I haven't messed with it much, it's an initial impression
- which for most people is the one that matters.
Worse is the battery life, I can't get more than 3 hours out of my XO and
all seems fine with the battery. If I was to heavily depend on the 24 hours
touted(when not even 24 in suspend), I would be very disappointed, let alone
6 hours which I also don't get. Experimental results isn't something that
the project should be shouting about all the time - that's just vaporware.
Worse, it makes the OLPC Foundation loose credibility as a whole. No company
can be constantly over promising and underdelivering, let alone a non-profit
foundation.
Currently, aside from the screen and mesh networking, you're loosing by big
points in all the rest. The advantages the XO still has are things that
don't matter for most potential buying governments, the ones who have the
big bucks.
I don't know where the foundation got the numbers in the first time, but 50
million laptops was far from anything that can be achieved. Especially
without retail availability of a $170 laptop. IMHO, or the XO-1 has retail
availability soon, that can(finally) bring that number to the desired
target, or you eventually loose out to Intel (with dire consequences). After
all, retail availability has been bringing production costs down for them.
Either you make it unprofitable for them or they make it unfeasible for you
to follow the vision.
You can't expect most people to pay $399 for a laptop (spectacular for third
world countries) of no (or limited) usefulness for a regular person. Not
with faster netbooks available at $199 (have you seen an acer one
booting???) - not everyone is so good at their heart to give one away, when
they can save $199 for themselves. Not everyone knows that your battery
lasts four times more, that it costs only $25 to replace, that all parts are
cheap, if they ever break! That doesn't matter for most people, even though
they should, and that leaves the XO

some 8.2.1 questions

2009-02-02 Thread Ties Stuij

Hi all,
We at OLE Nepal are pretty soon gonna have to finalize the build for
our deployment, and since 8.2.1 seems to have a number of nice fixes,
so we're gonna base it on that one. It doesn't seem however that we're
able to wait for the 8.2.1 final release. So in this light I have a
couple of questions I hope you can answer. I've followed all possible
channels of communication meticulously, and some of my questions might
seem a bit whiny of redundant -it seems like the staging builds are in
good shape-, but since this build will go on a couple of thousand
XO's, I'd rather be whiny now than sorry later.

mostly the first two I'd like answers to:
- which major bugs relevant to Nepal, if any, that are not yet
addressed by the staging builds are likely to be fixed by 8.2.1 in
general. And if any: are they expected to be fixed in the next couple
of days?
- is there anything seriously broken -any regression- atm compared to 8.2

- Is there a date set for the final build, and if so when?
- And if so, what are the chances of actually making that deadline :oP

Thanks!
/Ties
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Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread James Simmons

First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for 
Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on 
openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems 
to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting 
over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu 
box eventually.

Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two 
Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced 
that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip 
archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm 
thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only 
the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The 
master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow 
along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a 
version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would 
mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports 
collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with 
collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go 
about doing it?

Thanks,

James Simmons


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Re: looked for, but did not find, control knobs for mesh

2009-02-02 Thread quozl

On Mon, Feb 02, 2009 at 02:09:31AM -0500, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
 To me, two kids under a tree is a very important scenario. 
 Although mesh fails on current Joyrides, I'm experimenting with 
 manual intervention (e.g., ifconfig) to get it going anyway.

Said manual intervention could be added as a button to Sugar, I guess.

 Aside from ifconfig up/down, what other control knobs exist for 
 starting/stopping radio communication using a 169.254.x.x address ?

None.  However, don't forget to investigate iwpriv and iwlist.

I've just done some of my early tests again on build 767 using three
XOs.  The minimum to get a manual mesh to establish is, on each XO:

0.  stop NetworkManager, disable it, and reboot,

service NetworkManager stop
chkconfig NetworkManager off
reboot

1.  configure the radio (via the eth prefix),

iwconfig eth0 mode ad-hoc essid qu...@laptop.org channel 6

2.  configure the network interface (via the msh prefix),

ifconfig msh0 12.0.0.12

3.  emit packets,

ping 12.0.0.11

The result is that the forwarding table will begin to contain MAC
addresses.  This is one way to test if the mesh is operational, before
moving units apart.

iwpriv eth0 fwt_list

It isn't necessary to configure eth0 network interface with ifconfig if
you have no other need to do so.

-- 
James Cameronmailto:qu...@us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

Morgan Collett wrote:
 Also don't blame avahi for the fact that we send out updates every
 time you alt-tab between shared activities, so that your icon can jump
 to the appropriate snowflake on everyone else's Neighborhood Views...
 as well as sending who joined and left...

Mature GUIs have a common pattern to avoid too much graphical
flickering on possibly rapid state transitions, such as setting a busy
pointer or disabling buttons while some operation is in progress.

I don't know if it has a name, but the algorithm is exactly the same
for de-bouncing mechanical keys: you propagate the event only after
the state has settled for a certain amount of time.

This would take away a certain percentage of spurious updates, but the
number basically remains proportional to the number of users so it
doesn't scale much better.

-- 
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 \X/  Sugar Labs   - http://www.sugarlabs.org/
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Re: OLPC upgrades

2009/2/2 Tiago Marques tiago...@gmail.com

 On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote:

 Guess what? The people at OLPC, who aren't stupid, already considered
 every point in the message cited below, a long time ago. So why aren't
 we doing them? ...* *On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Carlos Nazareno
 object...@gmail.comwrote:

 Nobody's saying anyone is stupid. It is perfectly natural for people to
 complain about things they don't understand. I also wish I could, from time
 to time, to ask this or that, to understand many things I don't comprehend,
 to know what I can do to help. This without getting into any kind of fight
 with the people involved with the project, who are the only ones who can
 answer those questions.
 As with any critical comment I may issue in this mailing list,* please
 take it as something constructive*, to help (if it does, in any way) and
 not to criticize the people who are hard at work. That, I think, is what
 Carlos was trying to do.
 I got my XO three weeks ago and there's a lot I was surprised to learn that
 some of the more important features are WIP or simply don't work, especially
 given the news that I've read, already detailing prototypes of a second
 version, when there's still a lot to do with the first one.


Hey Tiago,

I've been following the project for about 2 years now and the software
problems you cite (OOM crashing, flaky wireless,  battery life, sluggish UI)
are pretty much the same ones that existed back when I got involved!  The
lack of momentum on the software front has been pretty amazing given how
much the project started with.

That said, things seem to be picking up speed as more control over the
software is handed to the community.  I finally feel like there's maybe a
chance to see some of this stuff get resolved.

Here's hoping SL's XOOS or SoaS, or else some deployment's distribution will
take better advantage of the excellent hardware that is the XO-1.  I'd
really like to see someone try to build a tiny LFS based XO specific distro
which runs Sugar, and boots in 30sec :)  I've got my personal XO booting in
around 45sec just by hacking around in the initscripts, and I'm sure a lot
better could be done.

Best,
-Wade
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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
collaboration not supported.

Best,
Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:

 First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
 Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
 openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
 to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
 over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
 box eventually.

 Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
 Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
 that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
 archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
 thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
 the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
 master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
 along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.

 While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
 version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
 mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
 collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
 collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
 about doing it?

 Thanks,

 James Simmons


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
 When I read the Zeroconf book, I got the impression that the
 _standard_ was carefully designed to minimize needless broadcasts and
 scale well in real scenarios.  I can't comment on the current Avahi
 _implementation_ though.
 
 This is true for wired networks; not necessarily true for mobile
 and/or wireless networks.

IEEE chose to make wi-fi networks look like 802.11 LANs, similar to
ethernet.  It might have been a bad idea in retrospect, but now we
have to live with it.

AFAIK, the bulk of the problem with multicasts over 802.11s (and not
all wi-fi networks) is that those must be propagated at the slowest
possible link speed in order to reach all nodes.


 Like Martin, you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.

Ok, but how would the laptops advertise their SRV records without
multicast DNS?

Wait, are you perhaps suggesting to use DDNS to publish those services
on a nameserver running on the XS?

-- 
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 \X/  Sugar Labs   - http://www.sugarlabs.org/
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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule. I think this ought to
be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
authorship documents) do something more.

2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
collaboration not supported.

Best,
Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons
jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:

First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
Fedora 10. After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
to work! It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
over with a new distribution. I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
box eventually.

Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides. Unfortunately, I am convinced
that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
archives over the network is not and never will be practical. What I'm
thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation. The
master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
along. I'm not sure that's practical, either.

While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all. This would
mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
collaboration. When I figure out something intelligent to do with
collaboration I'll restore it. Is this possible, and how would I go
about doing it?

Thanks,

James Simmons

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Re: some 8.2.1 questions

2009-02-02 Thread Daniel Drake

2009/2/2 Ties Stuij cjst...@gmail.com:
 mostly the first two I'd like answers to:
 - which major bugs relevant to Nepal, if any, that are not yet
 addressed by the staging builds are likely to be fixed by 8.2.1 in
 general. And if any: are they expected to be fixed in the next couple
 of days?

http://dev.laptop.org/report/38 sums it up really...
We have some coding and testing left to do for key delegation.
Someone needs to test synaptics touchpad with new OFW.
Release notes need finishing off.

Apart from that, it is done.

 - is there anything seriously broken -any regression- atm compared to 8.2

Not that we know of.

 - Is there a date set for the final build, and if so when?

No date is set but I am working to get it ready ASAP, hopefully
finished this week if I get my way, as we need it for paraguay with an
immediate timeframe.

Daniel
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keyboard handling (was Re: OLPC where to go development advice.)

2009-02-02 Thread S Page

Summary: I updated
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_shortcuts
and several other pages, but mysteries remain.

p...@laptop.org usefully responded:

 I have zero clue where to find the keymapping 
 file or configuration utility.
 
 i just booted ubuntu to see how they do it -- turns out it's easy.
 they use a program called xbindkeys to bind all of the special XO
 keys.  the configuration for that is in /home/olpc/.xbindkeysrc -- you'll
 see an entry in there that invokes /usr/bin/rotate_screen.py.

I added this to 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions 
Folks, this is the page where distros note their tweaks for the benefit 
of humanity.

I think Sugar doesn't use that technique.  The same page points to 
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=sugar;a=blob;f=src/jarabe/view/keyhandler.py;hb=HEAD
 
, but what hooks this code to keyboard events?

BTW, keyhandler.py also lists some nifty undocumented equivalents for 
some of the XO's buttons and keys:
   # the following are intended for emulator users
 'altshiftf'  : 'frame',
 'altshiftq'  : 'quit_emulator',
 'altshifto'  : 'open_search',
 'altshiftr'  : 'rotate',
 'altshifts'  : 'say_text'
and indeed, altshiftf/o/r work on my XO in 8.2.0.  I couldn't find 
any documentation for these, so I added them to the table in 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_shortcuts and mentioned them in 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Help_and_tips#How_to

Tomeu wrote
 It's sugar who listens for the keycode 0xEB and asks xrandr to rotate
 the screen.

According to 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ec_specification#KeyCodes_for_Buttons , the 
keycode for rotate are make=0x69, break=0xE9.  How do these become 0xEB?

I tried all the xkb* command-line programs to find the keymap, it seems that
   xmodmap -pk
shows it.  But it doesn't show anything relevant to the special buttons 
around the screen, I guess because they aren't part of the keyboard itself.

The olpc keyboard mappings in /usr/share/X11/xkb/*/olpc do map several 
XO keys to keysyms, e.g.
   key I147 { [ XF86TaskPane ] }; // frame key (the top-right key)

but I think Sugar doesn't use the keysym, it looks directly for the key 
or its keystroke equivalent.  It seems the olpc X11 keyboard mappings 
are to make the XO-1's keys mean something when running other desktop 
environments than Sugar.

Keyboard handling is spread across lots of subsystems and pages, I'll 
improve them with any information I receive.

--
=S
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Service announcement scheme - (Re: A small request.)

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 5:13 AM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@laptop.org wrote:
 Martin Langhoff wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:39 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 My suggestions:  DNS-SD and libepc (http://live.gnome.org/libepc/).
 There's no need for Sugar-specific solutions here; we just need to use
 existing standard solutions.

 Yep - I want existing standard stuff, but the devil we know seems to
 swamp the spectrum with 802.11s.

 When I read the Zeroconf book, I got the impression that the
 _standard_ was carefully designed to minimize needless broadcasts and
 scale well in real scenarios.  I can't comment on the current Avahi
 _implementation_ though.

This is true for wired networks; not necessarily true for mobile
and/or wireless networks.

Like Martin, you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.
 --scott


-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )
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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

I think this project often makes the perfect into the enemy of the good.
Consequently we end up having less collaboration than, e.g., any system in
the last 10 years that could install vnc server, while claiming that
collaboration is a principal focus of the project.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote:

I think some simplistic automatic collaboration being built into Sugar, has
been discussed, possibly even prototyped.
Just a matter of engineering motivation/time perhaps.
-Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.comwrote:

2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
collaboration not supported.

Best,
Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com
wrote:

Thanks,

James Simmons

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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Eben Eliason

I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
would be logical here. Make it an integer indicating the maximum
number of supported participants. Unshared activities would report
'1', activities like video chat (with technical limitations) or chess
(with obvious player limits) might specify 2, and others could specify
another cap based on resource requirements and/or a constant to
indicate an unbounded number.

That number could be used both to show/hide the sharing controls (in
the activity or elsewhere) for that activity, and also help keep the
participants list at a manageable size for the given activity.
Limitations are natural, and activity specific; it's not reasonable to
expect all collaborative activities to scale in the same way.

Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
in that manner. Scott, could you point to any materials you've
already written up on the matter? Would you have time and/or desire
to assist others who are interested in taking on such a feature? I'd
love to see this happen, myself, and have given some preliminary
thought to the UI already.

- Eben

2009/2/2 Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com:
I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule. I think this ought to
be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
authorship documents) do something more.

2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

There might be something in the Sugar Almanac,
see http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.
Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75
Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
collaboration not supported.
Best,
Wade
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com
wrote:

Thanks,

James Simmons

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Re: OLPC upgrades

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:18 PM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote:

 2009/2/2 Tiago Marques tiago...@gmail.com

 On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote:

 Guess what? The people at OLPC, who aren't stupid, already considered
 every point in the message cited below, a long time ago. So why aren't
 we doing them? ...* *On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Carlos Nazareno
 object...@gmail.comwrote:

 Nobody's saying anyone is stupid. It is perfectly natural for people to
 complain about things they don't understand. I also wish I could, from time
 to time, to ask this or that, to understand many things I don't comprehend,
 to know what I can do to help. This without getting into any kind of fight
 with the people involved with the project, who are the only ones who can
 answer those questions.
 As with any critical comment I may issue in this mailing list,* please
 take it as something constructive*, to help (if it does, in any way) and
 not to criticize the people who are hard at work. That, I think, is what
 Carlos was trying to do.
 I got my XO three weeks ago and there's a lot I was surprised to learn
 that some of the more important features are WIP or simply don't work,
 especially given the news that I've read, already detailing prototypes of a
 second version, when there's still a lot to do with the first one.


 Hey Tiago,

 I've been following the project for about 2 years now and the software
 problems you cite (OOM crashing, flaky wireless,  battery life, sluggish UI)
 are pretty much the same ones that existed back when I got involved!  The
 lack of momentum on the software front has been pretty amazing given how
 much the project started with.

 That said, things seem to be picking up speed as more control over the
 software is handed to the community.  I finally feel like there's maybe a
 chance to see some of this stuff get resolved.

 Here's hoping SL's XOOS or SoaS, or else some deployment's distribution
 will take better advantage of the excellent hardware that is the XO-1.  I'd
 really like to see someone try to build a tiny LFS based XO specific distro
 which runs Sugar, and boots in 30sec :)  I've got my personal XO booting in
 around 45sec just by hacking around in the initscripts, and I'm sure a lot
 better could be done.

Hi Wade,
I use Gentoo for professional and personal use in almost all of my machines
and will probably install Gentoo in some binary way to dual boot the XO with
Sugar(it fits the XO too well, in some ways, to simply delete it). This will
be the most optimized code I can have the compiler generate, which should
yield some nice improvements, compiled with the smallest feature set needed.
I have a machine running KDE 3.5 in 80MB with two or three KDE apps loaded,
but that is still overkill for the XO. XFCE/Fluxbox would be something to
experiment with.
I have a server here in college to do a package server, with which other
users may use, but I still need some free time to finish the basic gentoo
based distro, which will hardly come with an installer, other than a stage
package compiled for the Geode.
I would like to see python less resource bound but I unfortunately have
neither the time nor the skill to go hacking it.
Best regards,
  Tiago Marques


 Best,
 -Wade

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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Andrés Ambrois

On Monday 02 February 2009 21:30:46 Carol Farlow Lerche wrote:
 I'm guessing someone has already suggested this on some list or other, but
 in my experience kids like to watch over each other's shoulder, and a
 default collaboration of everyone watches, one person types vnc would in
 my opinion be the 80 of a collaboration 80-20 rule.  I think this ought to
 be implemented in the sugar infrastructure, and then let activities that
 have an obvious extended collaboration (such as two person games or shared
 authorship documents) do something more.

Please take a look at Chris Ball's recent work on MPX over VNC: 
http://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-remote-desktop

 2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

  There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
  http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.
 
  Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:
 
 
  http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathac
 tivity.py#line75
 
  Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
  collaboration not supported.
 
  Best,
  Wade
 
  On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons 
jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:
  First, I want to praise whoever put together the Sugar packages for
  Fedora 10.  After struggling with Xubuntu and with sugar-jhbuild on
  openSUSE I finally have a sugar test environment where everything seems
  to work!  It was well worth wiping out my openSUSE install and starting
  over with a new distribution.  I'll probably do the same to my Xubuntu
  box eventually.
 
  Second, now that I have this I want to perfect collaboration on my two
  Activities, Read Etexts and View Slides.  Unfortunately, I am convinced
  that collaboration in View Slides that involves sending large Zip
  archives over the network is not and never will be practical.  What I'm
  thinking about now is making the person sharing a slide show see only
  the image being viewed on the XO that has the full presentation.  The
  master XO would page through the slides and those sharing would follow
  along.  I'm not sure that's practical, either.
 
  While I'm figuring this out, what I'd really like to do is release a
  version of View Slides that has no collaboration at all.  This would
  mean hiding the control on the Activity toolbar that supports
  collaboration.  When I figure out something intelligent to do with
  collaboration I'll restore it.  Is this possible, and how would I go
  about doing it?
 
  Thanks,
 
  James Simmons
 
 
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Re: keyboard handling (was Re: OLPC where to go development advice.)

2009-02-02 Thread pgf

s wrote:
  Summary: I updated
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_shortcuts
  and several other pages, but mysteries remain.
  
  p...@laptop.org usefully responded:
  
   I have zero clue where to find the keymapping 
   file or configuration utility.
   
   i just booted ubuntu to see how they do it -- turns out it's easy.
   they use a program called xbindkeys to bind all of the special XO
   keys.  the configuration for that is in /home/olpc/.xbindkeysrc -- you'll
   see an entry in there that invokes /usr/bin/rotate_screen.py.
  
  I added this to 
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions 
  Folks, this is the page where distros note their tweaks for the benefit 
  of humanity.
  
  I think Sugar doesn't use that technique.  ...

but i've been wondering if perhaps it should.

given that sugar is now multi-platform, does it make sense for
sugar itself to be managing the special XO keyboard keys?  seems like
pulling that support out would let it be reused by non-sugar
distros more readily.

what happens when you press F9 through F12 when running SoaS?
(i think those are the volume and brightness keys on the XO.)

paul
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Re: Service announcement scheme - (Re: [Sugar-devel] A small request.)

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Martin Langhoff
martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:39 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 My suggestions:  DNS-SD and libepc (http://live.gnome.org/libepc/).
 There's no need for Sugar-specific solutions here; we just need to use
 existing standard solutions.

 Yep - I want existing standard stuff, but the devil we know seems to
 swamp the spectrum with 802.11s.

 Googling leads to a paper that could be useful. I don't have access -
 but they seem to claim that they can get DNS-SD to _not_ mess the mesh
 up with some new technique requiring new and adventurous patches
 affecting the mesh routing nodes:

 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel5/4489030/4489031/04489571.pdf?temp=x

 I don't want adventure. I want something old and safe ;-)

 Maybe we can fake this with good old DNS lookups - but those will fail
 if the DNS server has a wildcard (like commercial hotspots do).

I think you are confusing mDNS with DNS-SD.
 --scott

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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

I think some simplistic automatic collaboration being built into Sugar, has
been discussed, possibly even prototyped.
Just a matter of engineering motivation/time perhaps.
-Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote:

2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com

There might be something in the Sugar Almanac, see
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/Resources for a link.

Alternately, an example of how to disable sharing is here:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/math/repos/mainline/blobs/master/mathactivity.py#line75

Note to Sugar toolkit guys, I'd love to have a formal API to indicate
collaboration not supported.

Best,
Wade

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, James Simmons
jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote:

Thanks,

James Simmons

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Re: OLPC upgrades

2009-02-02 Thread Nirbheek Chauhan

Since you're looking at making a gentoo-based sugar distro, you might
find http://gitorious.org/projects/sugar-gentoo useful :)

On 2/3/09, Tiago Marques tiago...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:18 PM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote:

 2009/2/2 Tiago Marques tiago...@gmail.com

 On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote:

 Guess what? The people at OLPC, who aren't stupid, already considered
 every point in the message cited below, a long time ago. So why aren't
 we doing them? ...* *On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Carlos Nazareno
 object...@gmail.comwrote:

 Nobody's saying anyone is stupid. It is perfectly natural for people to
 complain about things they don't understand. I also wish I could, from
 time
 to time, to ask this or that, to understand many things I don't
 comprehend,
 to know what I can do to help. This without getting into any kind of
 fight
 with the people involved with the project, who are the only ones who can
 answer those questions.
 As with any critical comment I may issue in this mailing list,* please
 take it as something constructive*, to help (if it does, in any way) and
 not to criticize the people who are hard at work. That, I think, is what
 Carlos was trying to do.
 I got my XO three weeks ago and there's a lot I was surprised to learn
 that some of the more important features are WIP or simply don't work,
 especially given the news that I've read, already detailing prototypes of
 a
 second version, when there's still a lot to do with the first one.


 Hey Tiago,

 I've been following the project for about 2 years now and the software
 problems you cite (OOM crashing, flaky wireless,  battery life, sluggish
 UI)
 are pretty much the same ones that existed back when I got involved!  The
 lack of momentum on the software front has been pretty amazing given how
 much the project started with.

 That said, things seem to be picking up speed as more control over the
 software is handed to the community.  I finally feel like there's maybe a
 chance to see some of this stuff get resolved.

 Here's hoping SL's XOOS or SoaS, or else some deployment's distribution
 will take better advantage of the excellent hardware that is the XO-1.
 I'd
 really like to see someone try to build a tiny LFS based XO specific
 distro
 which runs Sugar, and boots in 30sec :)  I've got my personal XO booting
 in
 around 45sec just by hacking around in the initscripts, and I'm sure a lot
 better could be done.

 Hi Wade,
 I use Gentoo for professional and personal use in almost all of my machines
 and will probably install Gentoo in some binary way to dual boot the XO with
 Sugar(it fits the XO too well, in some ways, to simply delete it). This will
 be the most optimized code I can have the compiler generate, which should
 yield some nice improvements, compiled with the smallest feature set needed.
 I have a machine running KDE 3.5 in 80MB with two or three KDE apps loaded,
 but that is still overkill for the XO. XFCE/Fluxbox would be something to
 experiment with.
 I have a server here in college to do a package server, with which other
 users may use, but I still need some free time to finish the basic gentoo
 based distro, which will hardly come with an installer, other than a stage
 package compiled for the Geode.
 I would like to see python less resource bound but I unfortunately have
 neither the time nor the skill to go hacking it.
 Best regards,
   Tiago Marques


 Best,
 -Wade



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Re: keyboard handling (was Re: OLPC where to go development advice.)

It seems that the implementations for volume and brightness keys are handled
separately from the remainder of the keyboard in most laptops.  I have
recently been installing Linux in various older laptops, some with gnome,
some with xfce, and have found the laptop special keys scripts in
/etc/acpi.  Is this a debian/ubuntu-ism?

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:47 PM, p...@laptop.org wrote:

 s wrote:
   Summary: I updated
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_shortcuts
   and several other pages, but mysteries remain.
  
   p...@laptop.org usefully responded:
  
I have zero clue where to find the keymapping
file or configuration utility.
   
i just booted ubuntu to see how they do it -- turns out it's easy.
they use a program called xbindkeys to bind all of the special XO
keys.  the configuration for that is in /home/olpc/.xbindkeysrc --
 you'll
see an entry in there that invokes /usr/bin/rotate_screen.py.
  
   I added this to
   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions
   Folks, this is the page where distros note their tweaks for the benefit
   of humanity.
  
   I think Sugar doesn't use that technique.  ...

 but i've been wondering if perhaps it should.

 given that sugar is now multi-platform, does it make sense for
 sugar itself to be managing the special XO keyboard keys?  seems like
 pulling that support out would let it be reused by non-sugar
 distros more readily.

 what happens when you press F9 through F12 when running SoaS?
 (i think those are the volume and brightness keys on the XO.)

 paul
 =-
  paul fox, p...@laptop.org
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Re: keyboard handling (was Re: OLPC where to go development advice.)

2009-02-02 Thread david

at the OS level the brightness and volume keys are just the standard 
F9-F12 keys


if you look at the 'keyboard shortcuts' page on the wiki they are even 
documented that way (or at least I think they were at one point)


it's Sugar that decides to monkey with the brightness and volume when 
those keys are pressed.


the other distros setup the mapping using the specific tools for that 
desktop. but they all boil down to setting up something to look for those 
keys and then running the appropriate script.


David Lang

On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, Carol Farlow Lerche wrote:


It seems that the implementations for volume and brightness keys are handled
separately from the remainder of the keyboard in most laptops.  I have
recently been installing Linux in various older laptops, some with gnome,
some with xfce, and have found the laptop special keys scripts in
/etc/acpi.  Is this a debian/ubuntu-ism?

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:47 PM, p...@laptop.org wrote:


s wrote:
 Summary: I updated
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Keyboard_shortcuts
 and several other pages, but mysteries remain.

 p...@laptop.org usefully responded:

 I have zero clue where to find the keymapping
 file or configuration utility.

 i just booted ubuntu to see how they do it -- turns out it's easy.
 they use a program called xbindkeys to bind all of the special XO
 keys.  the configuration for that is in /home/olpc/.xbindkeysrc --
you'll
 see an entry in there that invokes /usr/bin/rotate_screen.py.

 I added this to
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_XO_features_on_other_distributions
 Folks, this is the page where distros note their tweaks for the benefit
 of humanity.

 I think Sugar doesn't use that technique.  ...

but i've been wondering if perhaps it should.

given that sugar is now multi-platform, does it make sense for
sugar itself to be managing the special XO keyboard keys?  seems like
pulling that support out would let it be reused by non-sugar
distros more readily.

what happens when you press F9 through F12 when running SoaS?
(i think those are the volume and brightness keys on the XO.)

paul
=-
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Re: OLPC upgrades

Thanks, much appreciated :)

Best regards

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:59 PM, Nirbheek Chauhan 
nirbheek.chau...@gmail.com wrote:

 Since you're looking at making a gentoo-based sugar distro, you might
 find http://gitorious.org/projects/sugar-gentoo useful :)

 On 2/3/09, Tiago Marques tiago...@gmail.com wrote:
  On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:18 PM, Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  2009/2/2 Tiago Marques tiago...@gmail.com
 
  On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote:
 
  Guess what? The people at OLPC, who aren't stupid, already considered
  every point in the message cited below, a long time ago. So why aren't
  we doing them? ...* *On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Carlos Nazareno
  object...@gmail.comwrote:
 
  Nobody's saying anyone is stupid. It is perfectly natural for people to
  complain about things they don't understand. I also wish I could, from
  time
  to time, to ask this or that, to understand many things I don't
  comprehend,
  to know what I can do to help. This without getting into any kind of
  fight
  with the people involved with the project, who are the only ones who
 can
  answer those questions.
  As with any critical comment I may issue in this mailing list,* please
  take it as something constructive*, to help (if it does, in any way)
 and
  not to criticize the people who are hard at work. That, I think, is
 what
  Carlos was trying to do.
  I got my XO three weeks ago and there's a lot I was surprised to learn
  that some of the more important features are WIP or simply don't work,
  especially given the news that I've read, already detailing prototypes
 of
  a
  second version, when there's still a lot to do with the first one.
 
 
  Hey Tiago,
 
  I've been following the project for about 2 years now and the software
  problems you cite (OOM crashing, flaky wireless,  battery life, sluggish
  UI)
  are pretty much the same ones that existed back when I got involved!
  The
  lack of momentum on the software front has been pretty amazing given how
  much the project started with.
 
  That said, things seem to be picking up speed as more control over the
  software is handed to the community.  I finally feel like there's maybe
 a
  chance to see some of this stuff get resolved.
 
  Here's hoping SL's XOOS or SoaS, or else some deployment's distribution
  will take better advantage of the excellent hardware that is the XO-1.
  I'd
  really like to see someone try to build a tiny LFS based XO specific
  distro
  which runs Sugar, and boots in 30sec :)  I've got my personal XO
 booting
  in
  around 45sec just by hacking around in the initscripts, and I'm sure a
 lot
  better could be done.
 
  Hi Wade,
  I use Gentoo for professional and personal use in almost all of my
 machines
  and will probably install Gentoo in some binary way to dual boot the XO
 with
  Sugar(it fits the XO too well, in some ways, to simply delete it). This
 will
  be the most optimized code I can have the compiler generate, which should
  yield some nice improvements, compiled with the smallest feature set
 needed.
  I have a machine running KDE 3.5 in 80MB with two or three KDE apps
 loaded,
  but that is still overkill for the XO. XFCE/Fluxbox would be something to
  experiment with.
  I have a server here in college to do a package server, with which other
  users may use, but I still need some free time to finish the basic gentoo
  based distro, which will hardly come with an installer, other than a
 stage
  package compiled for the Geode.
  I would like to see python less resource bound but I unfortunately have
  neither the time nor the skill to go hacking it.
  Best regards,
Tiago Marques
 
 
  Best,
  -Wade
 
 

 --
 Sent from my mobile device

 ~Nirbheek Chauhan

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Eben Eliason wrote:
 I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
 would be logical here.  Make it an integer indicating the maximum
 number of supported participants.

OK, but as an Activity author I might like to specify that cap at runtime,
depending on many things, such as the size of the document.  I might even
want to let the initiator choose the number of participants.  I think we
should also have a runtime API, so that the cap that can be varied at any
time.

In fact, it might be nice to have a a generic solution for defining config
variables that can be controlled either statically or at runtime.  We have
mentioned a wide variety of such variables, including things like whether
screen rotation is supported.

 Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
 adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner. 

I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC sharing,
regardless of max_participants.

- --Ben
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Eben Eliason

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Eben Eliason wrote:
 I think that the addition of a new property in the activity.info file
 would be logical here.  Make it an integer indicating the maximum
 number of supported participants.

 OK, but as an Activity author I might like to specify that cap at runtime,
 depending on many things, such as the size of the document.  I might even
 want to let the initiator choose the number of participants.  I think we
 should also have a runtime API, so that the cap that can be varied at any
 time.

That's a good observation.  You're right; I was seeing hard limits,
but soft limits could certainly be implemented via some API that Sugar
could call into to retrieve the info.  The static declaration could be
used as the fallback.

 In fact, it might be nice to have a a generic solution for defining config
 variables that can be controlled either statically or at runtime.  We have
 mentioned a wide variety of such variables, including things like whether
 screen rotation is supported.

Right.

 Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
 adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner.

 I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC sharing,
 regardless of max_participants.

Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper bound
on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
that's an activity-specific parameter.

- Eben

 - --Ben
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 UpAAniXtXxWRQuM8o8iqtiyJ0uB4o05Z
 =BI5d
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Eben Eliason wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
 bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner.
 I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC sharing,
 regardless of max_participants.
 
 Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
 the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
 limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
 shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
 full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper bound
 on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
 that's an activity-specific parameter.

Oh! That's beautiful.

Let's do that.

- --Ben
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Martin Langhoff

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 OK, but as an Activity author I might like to specify that cap at runtime,
 depending on many things, such as the size of the document.

... start collaborating on an empty Write.xo doc, and shed
participants dynamically as the document grows ;-)



m
-- 
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 mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

2009-02-02 Thread Gary C Martin

On 3 Feb 2009, at 01:02, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Eben Eliason wrote:
 On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
 bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme,  
 whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be  
 viewed
 in that manner.
 I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC  
 sharing,
 regardless of max_participants.

 Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
 the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
 limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
 shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
 full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper  
 bound
 on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
 that's an activity-specific parameter.

 Oh! That's beautiful.

 Let's do that.

I don't mean to rain on the parade here, but am I the only one who  
finds VNC slow even on high spec equipment over a dedicated broadband  
connection? I do use it occasionally for remote support, so it does  
have its uses – but a handful of XOs in the same wireless spectrum?  
Ouch. From a technical stand point VNC is going to be almost always  
more memory hungry, more cpu hungry, and more bandwidth hungry than  
most activity collaborations, seems to be an overly hopeful  
collaboration method to fallback on.

Happy to be proven wrong, and I guess it could be a Sugar feature not  
really intended for XOs.

Regards,
--Gary

 - --Ben
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
 Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)

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Re: OLPC upgrades

2009/2/2 Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com:
 take better advantage of the excellent hardware that is the XO-1.  I'd
 really like to see someone try to build a tiny LFS based XO specific distro
 which runs Sugar, and boots in 30sec :)  I've got my personal XO booting in
 around 45sec just by hacking around in the initscripts, and I'm sure a lot
 better could be done.

Patches?
 --scott

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

Gary, I've used it for many years on machines much less powerful than the
XO, often for an sshable net meeting with multiple participants, and I think
you might need to do a few simple things to speed it up for yourself.
(Remove fancy graphic backdrop, try for a smaller palette).  These things
are pretty congruent with the normal state of the desktop on the XO.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:26 PM, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote:

 On 3 Feb 2009, at 01:02, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

  -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
  Hash: SHA1
 
  Eben Eliason wrote:
  On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 7:33 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
  bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
  In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme,
  whereby
  any activity that already has max_participants in it could be
  viewed
  in that manner.
  I don't see why any Activity should be excluded from such VNC
  sharing,
  regardless of max_participants.
 
  Of course not.  I didn't mean to imply such a limitation; only that
  the VNC solution would be the /only/ option after some participants
  limit was reached.  That is, you could either Join or Watch any
  shared activity, but the Join option would disappear once
  full...Watch would remain. It's possible we'd have an upper
  bound
  on the number of people who could watch as well, but I don't think
  that's an activity-specific parameter.
 
  Oh! That's beautiful.
 
  Let's do that.

 I don't mean to rain on the parade here, but am I the only one who
 finds VNC slow even on high spec equipment over a dedicated broadband
 connection? I do use it occasionally for remote support, so it does
 have its uses – but a handful of XOs in the same wireless spectrum?
 Ouch. From a technical stand point VNC is going to be almost always
 more memory hungry, more cpu hungry, and more bandwidth hungry than
 most activity collaborations, seems to be an overly hopeful
 collaboration method to fallback on.

 Happy to be proven wrong, and I guess it could be a Sugar feature not
 really intended for XOs.

 Regards,
 --Gary

  - --Ben
  -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
  Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)
 
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Re: Service announcement scheme - (Re: [Sugar-devel] A small request.)

2009-02-02 Thread Martin Langhoff

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 11:13 AM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote:
 802.11s is not simple, nor safe.

lol. That's right.

Now, you are talking about DNS-SD without mDNS. Spent some good time
reading up on both, and DNS-SD sounds good for what we're trying to
do. Everybody uses them together, however, and all the nice libraries
(avahi and friends) make no distinction between the two.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong docs - so pointers welcome.

If I'm right, however, we can still write our own simple dns-sd client
glue and a abuse named on the XS.

 Please concentrate on plain 802.11 networks for now.

It's not so black-and-white . Whatever its status right now, 802.11s
is still an important consideration.

cheers,


m
-- 
 martin.langh...@gmail.com
 mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Re: Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Eben Eliason e...@laptop.org wrote:
 Scott (CC'd) has already come up with some really nice proposals for
 adding VNC as an alternate colaboration mechanism for all activities.
 In my mind, this would work perfectly with the above scheme, whereby
 any activity that already has max_participants in it could be viewed
 in that manner.  Scott, could you point to any materials you've
 already written up on the matter?  Would you have time and/or desire
 to assist others who are interested in taking on such a feature?  I'd
 love to see this happen, myself, and have given some preliminary
 thought to the UI already.

Chris Ball has actually started to implement this:
  http://cananian.livejournal.com/54002.html
  http://blog.printf.net/articles/2009/01/26/multi-pointer-remote-desktop

Written up in http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/sugarcamp-collab.pdf
(video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Ei2fp4Iww ).
 --scott

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Is it possible to disable sharing for an Activity?